Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria at war

Notes on the birth of an engaged
ethnosociology

■

Tassadit Yacine

École des Hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, France

Translated by Loïc Wacquant and James Ingram

A B S T R A C T

■

Pierre Bourdieu’s early trajectory is retraced to highlight

the foundational role his fieldwork in colonial Algeria played in his
intellectual development and subsequent sociological theorizing. Plunged
without forewarning into the midst of a caste society torn by capitalist
development and a brutal war of national liberation, the young
philosopher turned to empirical investigation in order to understand
Algerian society from the inside and to take apart the mechanisms of
imperial rule. This article reconstitutes the proximate academic milieu, the
intellectual signposts, the personal contacts, and the tragic political
conjuncture within which Bourdieu’s youthful inquiries took shape. These
inquiries, which entailed dangerous fieldwork in regions fought over by
the French military and the guerrillas of the Algerian National Liberation
Front, were facilitated by Bourdieu’s social and regional dispositions as a
‘colonized of the interior’ of France and led him to erase the established
intellectual division of labor between sociology, ethnology, and Oriental
studies. It is in the Algerian crucible, suffused by fear, risk, and ‘ambient
fascism’, that an engaged ethnosociology was forged, alive to the
complexity of the real and resistant to theoretical simplification.
Bourdieu’s first field studies of the uprooting of the Algerian peasantry
and the birth of that country’s urban (sub)proletariat are essential to
understanding the formation of his intellectual dispositions and bring to
light the organic linkage that existed from the outset between his
scientific and political engagements.

graphy

Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
www.sagepublications.com Vol 5(4): 487–509[DOI: 10.1177/1466138104050703]

A R T I C L E

K E Y W O R D S

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Bourdieu, colonialism, war, dispossession, intellectuals,

engagement, science, politics, Kabylia, Algeria

Algeria occupies a pivotal place in Bourdieu’s thought and work, such that
it is impossible for a serious analyst to ignore it when seeking to understand
his distinctive intellectual approach (especially his ethnographic vision) and
his core problematics, as well as the Kabyle references that frequently dot
his analyses, including those having nothing to do with this region and
culture. These references are sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit or even
allusive, but they are omnipresent.

1

Thus it behooves the reader or listener

to decode them in order to grasp their deeper meaning. For Pierre Bourdieu,
it goes without saying that his Algerian and Kabyle experience is at the basis
of his epistemological position and of the original political perception that
animates his works and led him, like Durkheim before him, to fuse ethnol-
ogy and sociology, and thereby to set off the ongoing scientific revolution
henceforth associated with his name.

It is only possible to grasp the specificity and originality of Bourdieu’s

thought by situating it within the particular social and political context that
was the trigger of its unfolding: Algerian society caught in the vise of
colonization and a war of independence. The aim of this article is not to
trace the trajectory of an intellectual immersed in an exotic society but,
starting from selected elements of this journey issued from a long work of
recollection carried out over the past several years by the protagonists of
the Algerian scene (among them Bourdieu himself), to suggest how this
youthful field formed and transformed a brilliant young academic from a
modest social background in a culturally dominated region of France. The
present article relies on published documents from the period as well as a
series of interviews with those who knew and were associated with Pierre
Bourdieu during this formative period and, above all, on continuous
intellectual exchange with him over the past three decades.

2

We will see

that, thanks to the dispositions of an ‘internally colonized’ Frenchman, the
‘uprooted’ young man from Béarn acquired an acute awareness of the
effects of ‘external’ colonization exerted by France on a North African
people dispossessed of their material possessions and collective dignity and
submitted to an implacable imperial domination. This forced encounter
with a harsh field site and topic at a dramatic historical moment hatched
in Bourdieu a new relationship to the world that led him to question the
academic knowledge and the scholastic posture he had practically mastered
but which remained constitutively foreign to him.

Thus the ethnological detour through the Algerian countryside led

Bourdieu to renew contact with his originary peasant culture by integrat-
ing it with the cognitive culture he had acquired at the university. From this

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one can understand, first, why Kabylia served him as an enlarging mirror
rendering intelligible the acculturation of the Béarn peasants he had grown
up amongst, and, second, how the investigations he conducted in his native
Béarn shed new light on Kabylia by offering, at the village level, the image
of an accelerated process of uprooting that was operating on the scale of
an entire country on the other side of the Mediterranean. The relation
between Béarn and Kabylia established on the basis of crisscrossing field
observations conducted during the same years (1959–61) led Bourdieu to
examine closely the behavior of the ‘empeasanted peasants’ of his childhood
village of Lesquire and of the uprooted peasants of Aghbala and Djemaâ
Saharidj.

A ‘colonized of the interior’ discovers the colony of the exterior

French colonization in Algeria was the longest and most destructive in the
whole of North Africa, as shown by comparison with Morocco and Tunisia
under the French protectorate (Ageron, 1997). This was due to a population
policy favoring colonists from the north – European and Christians, French,
but also Italian, Spanish, Sicilian, Maltese, etc. – at the expense of the
‘indigenous’, Arab or Berber-speaking, Muslim majority, who were rapidly
dispossessed of their land as well as the country’s natural resources (alfa,
cork, mines, gas and oil). In order to attract and settle Europeans, the
colonial system relied on systematic discrimination that favored the colonist
by granting him economic means and cultural and political guarantees
legitimating his supposed superiority in matters of language, customs, and
ideals. Thus, up to the 1950s, there were two electoral colleges in Algeria:
one for the Europeans and another for the indigenous, with one European
vote being equal to ten indigenous ones.

Colonial Algeria operated on a caste system, that is, a rigid hierarchy of

cultural groups cemented by strict endogamy. The Algerians revolted repeat-
edly against the French hold on their territory (1871, 1877, 1881, 1916,
1945); resilient opposition turned into open rejection of the colonial model
with the general insurrection of 1 November 1954. This insurrection
launched a decade of bloody war that pitted a systematic and methodical
military destruction of the Algerian nationalists by French power, on one
side, against fierce resistance and then counterattack by rural guerrilla
warfare and urban terrorism, on the other. Between these two forces,
initiatives for rapprochement and ‘reconciliation’ of the two communities
were initiated by various figures and political groups, but the dominant
colonial minority, which opposed any change and was willing to concede
nothing, ended up dragging the country into a spiral of murderous confron-
tation culminating in Algerian independence in July 1962.

3

This troubled

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period was decisive for a whole generation of French intellectuals, among
whom it produced a particular awakening of consciousness and political
maturity (Le Sueur, 2001). Bourdieu’s development during this period is not
without interest in this regard, since it moreover allows us to discern the
place and role of ethnology and sociology in this time of war.

What happened for this son of Béarn of popular origins (his father was

a sharecropper in a small village in the Pyrénées mountains who later
became a postal employee) to be diverted from his initial career path upon
leaving the Ecole normale supérieure – teaching and writing philosophy –
and to embrace instead a destiny that then appeared very gloomy and, in
many respects, contrary to his own expectations and those of his masters?
To answer this question, one must reconstitute the fabric of the intellectual
and political milieu of the era. The years Bourdieu spent in Algeria at war
coincided with those when the socialists of the SFIO were in power in Paris.
In 1956 Robert Lacoste was named Resident Minister in Algiers, where
intellectuals well-known among the national academic universe frequented
the General Government (nicknamed ‘the GG’), a highly political but also
cultural location. These included the left Catholic Émile Dermenghem, a
state archivist and librarian; the illustrious patriot and ethnologist
Germaine Tillion, a member of the cabinet of Jacques Soustelle (the anthro-
pologist specializing in the Aztecs), who preceded Lacoste as Governor
General; Vincent Monteil, an army officer and scholar of Islam; and Louis
Massignon, an Orientalist who was later elected to the Collège de France.

In an open political and military conflict of the colonial type, intellectual

autonomy is not to be had: at the University of Algiers there reigned a
climate of extreme tension and overt hostility toward the few partisans of
an ‘Algerian Algeria’. Within the local society a ‘cascade of contempt’
covered the large majority of the population who fell under the heel of the
privileged caste of colonists: Muslims (whether Arabs or Berbers), Jews,
Spaniards, Italians, and Maltese. Sent by a disciplinary decision to do his
military service under these circumstances, the young philosophy graduate
found a rigidly hierarchical world that seemed to him like a veritable social
laboratory:

I left for Algeria while I was in the army. After two hard years during which
it was not possible to do anything, I devoted myself to fieldwork. I began by
writing a book with the purpose of casting light on the drama of the Algerian
people and also on the colonists, whose situation was no less dramatic,
beyond their racism. (Bourdieu, 1986: 38)

Expression beyond the closed framework of colonial institutions in a

time of war pertained to heresy, at least for those who did not reside in the
metropole. In Algiers, a veritable climate of intellectual terror hung over
research circles (Nouschi, 2003; Sprecher, 2003). Despite the risks run even

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4 9 0

in Paris, some academics took brave public stands on the Algerian question
but without possessing the tools required to disentangle the issues, in
particular the necessary empirical knowledge at ground level.

4

How would

the young Bourdieu produce this knowledge when the threat of death
weighed on him as well as on his object as soon as he constituted it as
such?

Bourdieu was 25 when he first set foot on Algerian soil in October 1955.

He was first assigned to an air unit in the Chellif Valley, 150 kilometers west
of Algiers, as an air force rampant (a ‘crawler’, a term used to distinguish
ground personnel from pilots) with administrative duties, before returning
to Algiers thanks to the personal intervention of a member of the Lacoste
cabinet from Béarn, Colonel Ducourneau. Bourdieu was then assigned to
Algiers from 1956, in the documentation and information service of the
General Government, where he worked with Jacques Faugères and
Rollande Garèse, until completion of his military service. The General
Government then had one of the country’s best-stocked libraries. There
Bourdieu avidly read everything written on the colony in view of preparing
a first synthetic work on Algeria (Bourdieu, 1958), and also met important
figures who were well-informed about the country: the nonpareil archivist
Emile Dermenghem, author of a painstaking study of The Cult of the Saints
in Maghreb Islam (1954), and historian André Nouschi, working on his
Study on the Living Standards of the Populations of Rural Constantine
(1961), as well as the researchers of the University of Algiers and Social
Secretariat (a social science research center founded by the Church that
sought to reconcile the ‘Muslim’ and ‘Christian’ communities), in particu-
lar Henri Sanson (2003). The compulsory passage through this ‘observation
post’ that the General Government represented, from where he could
embrace and absorb the existing knowledge on a colonial society being torn
apart before his eyes, allowed the young academic to perceive the unfold-
ing of present history from a new angle: ‘I was struck by the acceleration
of the disintegration of this society,’ he told me in 1997. Direct access to
documentation, publications, and journals, as well as the personal relation-
ships he established during those months with local researchers, provided
him with the keys to a first synthetic grasp of the Algerian predicament,
even as he knew the country almost only from his readings.

As soon as he finished his service in 1957, Bourdieu joined the University

of Algiers, where he took up a post as an assistant professor, teaching phil-
osophy and sociology while conducting research from 1958 to 1961. From
the outset, he mixed statistics and ethnography in a series of studies on the
transformations of the urban and rural worlds, focusing on the genesis of
the subproletariat in shantytowns, the forced displacements of peasant
populations into resettlement camps at the initiative of the French army,
and the functioning of the family and household economy. Rapidly, his

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4 9 1

teaching, research, and proximity to the Algerians – especially the small
minority of Algerian intellectuals (a term used in a broad sense here since
Algerian society sported an astronomical rate of illiteracy) that emerged
during those years – did not fail to attract the attention of elements of the
far-right, who regarded him as a dangerous troublemaker. His friendships
and his first writings (Bourdieu, 1959a, 1959b, 1960) led to his being
forced, on the advice of a high-ranking officer, abruptly to leave Algeria in
May 1961 at night by military plane lest he risk being assassinated by
advocates of Algérie française: after the Algiers putsch, his name was on the
list of personalities to be eliminated. Upon landing overnight in Paris, it was
Raymond Aron, who had noticed him during a trip to Algiers as president
of the baccalaureate jury for Algeria and Tunisia, who enabled Bourdieu to
enter the Sorbonne as his assistant before finding a post the following year
teaching at the University of Lille.

5

The intellectual microcosm of Algiers University

How to make the object ‘Algeria’ exist, to render it visible and intelligible
in the chaos of a war denied and euphemized by colonial ideology under
the term ‘events’?

6

This was one of the central questions confronting the

young philosopher and future sociologist, and it explains his decision to
pursue empirical research to set in relief the disintegration of the structures
of the indigenous society. His position and dispositions as an uprooted intel-
lectual – a member of the dominant class and culture in view of his dazzling
ascent but always shaped by his dominated social and regional origins –
constituted a decisive advantage for taking apart the mechanisms of colonial
domination at their most destructive, especially since the memory of the
social and mental upheavals caused by the Second World War was still vivid
for the rising intellectuals of his generation.

The intellectual field of the 1950s did not allow the young researcher to

find his place at once. The vast majority of academics produced by coloniz-
ation continued to represent the system as the guardians of a colonizing
thought ‘verging on fascism’ (as Bourdieu once put it in a private conver-
sation). Free expression was then impossible in this closed and guarded
space – even forbidden for those who were foreign to it by their origins as
much as by their thinking. During this period, ‘the Algiers university
possessed a quasi-autonomy vis-à-vis the universities in France, with its own
hierarchies, its local modes of recruitment, its nearly-independent repro-
duction’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 7).

Schematically, two large currents structured the local academic field. The

first, of the right, was composed of French Algerians and the French ‘from
France’ (i.e. metropolitans marginalized by the pieds noirs) who favored

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4 9 2

maintaining imperial tutelage. Set against them was a ‘left’ current, a very
small minority but more structured and dominated by the communists. For
the world of left intellectuals was in the grip of the Party, which imposed
its ideas and directives in the colonies just as it did in France (the PCA, the
Algerian Communist Party, was then perceived as a simple appendage of
the PCF).

7

Beginning in 1956, the war reached its peak in the countryside

before gradually taking hold of the cities until the socialists in power in
Paris turned to heavy-handed repression (the French Minister of the Interior
at the time was François Mitterrand). French thought in the metropolis,
whether of the left or of the right, generally favored prosecution of the war,
with the exception of certain currents like the liberals or the left Christians
and certain communists such as Henri Alleg (1957), famous for having
denounced torture in Algeria; Maurice Audin, a mathematician and
communist activist who disappeared following a ‘round-up’ by French para-
troopers in Algiers; and Fernand Yveton, another communist militant
executed to set an example (Vidal-Naquet, 1961).

The University of Algiers was dominated by a powerful far-right lobby.

It was practically impossible to overtly position oneself outside of the far
right bloc, led by those known as the ‘ultras’: the soon-to-be OAS represen-
tative

8

Philippe Marçais and Jean Bousquet, a professor of sociology

known for his quasi-fascist ideas, were the masters of the campus
(Bourdieu, 2000). This climate of extreme intolerance accounts, for
example, for Professor André Mandouze, a Catholic known for his
engagement in favor of Algerian independence, being expelled from the
university – for want of having him lynched by his own students, fierce
partisans of Algérie française. The same attitude prevailed among students
of this persuasion toward Marcel Émerit (1951), a historian who had
written a highly-regarded book on the Emir Abdelkader (a religious and
political leader who resisted French occupation for several years after the
1830 conquest): he was hung in effigy by pieds noirs students for having
shown that the schooling rate was higher in Algeria before 1830 than after
colonization, thus disturbing the intellectual comfort of the colonial
academic establishment.

The struggle was fierce between the partisans of continued colonial rule

and their opponents, and this favored Orientalists close to political power,
who used this advantage to establish a quasi-monopoly on social science
research on Algeria from the sole fact of knowing Arabic. They considered
mastery of this language as a necessary and sufficient basis for claiming
knowledge of Algerian society. The Marçais family provides an example of
Arabists, ‘without any specialized training, who reigned over the Algiers
faculty, allocated research topics, and represented what was called
colonial anthropology’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 8). The Algiers sociologists and
ethnologists, most often educated on the job, were almost always Arab or

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Berber linguists, civil administrators, army officers, and clerics. But
Bourdieu did not restrict his contacts to the Algiers campus, which was
closed to new ideas – in contrast to earlier periods, especially the late 19th
and early 20th century. The White Fathers, the Jesuits, primary-school
teachers (indigènes said to be ‘evolved’), journalists, and students supplied
him with essential information for developing the intimate knowledge of
Algerian society that gradually became his. Thus Bourdieu was able to
develop solid intellectual relations with several researchers connected to the
Church, such as Fathers Jean-Marie Dallet and M. Devulder, and others
situated on the margins of the university, like the geographer Jean
Dresch, author of an important book on Agrarian Reform in the Maghreb
(1963).

In this quest to understand Algerian society, and the cultural practices of

linguistic minorities within it, the young ethnosociologist’s attention was
directed equally toward the condition of emergence of Kabyle intellectuals
who practiced – without knowing it – ethnology in the form of ‘ethno-
graphic novels’. Mouloud Feraoun, a school teacher become novelist,
assassinated by the OAS in 1962, was one of the first to read and comment
on Bourdieu’s early texts on Kabylia.

9

Malek Ouary, a writer and journalist

for Radio Algiers (a Kabyle station), also served as an informant. Later, the
writer, poet, and Kabyle ethnologist Mouloud Mammeri maintained an
intellectual relationship with Bourdieu from 1962 to 1989 (Yacine, forth-
coming).

10

Along with these intellectuals recognized nationally and across

the Mediterranean, there were also spontaneous ethnologists, who,
influenced by the works then available (descriptive studies by the White
Fathers and by military officers), declared themselves researchers by the
force of circumstances. Many of them, like Amar Boulifa, Slimane
Rahmani, and Brahim Zellal, gathered important materials for under-
standing the traditional social world, materials to which Bourdieu (1980)
made extensive reference in The Logic of Practice.

In this situation marked by political tension and the absence of reliable

data on a society in rapid and dramatic transformation, Bourdieu was
forced to conduct his own inquiries by turning to the nodal category of
Algerian society at the time: the uprooted peasants. The philosophy
graduate, who had worked and sacrificed so much to acquire the dominant
culture, thus had to renounce the prestigious symbolic capital of philosophy
and break with the scholastic vision inculcated by his academic training in
order to render intelligible through empirical observation the material and
moral misery of an entire people. ‘I had to abandon my dear studies to write
a book of social service,’ Bourdieu (2003: 232) explains, speaking of his
first book, Sociologie de l’Algérie. By the same token, he was led to forsake
the position of witness, marked by culpability, to adopt the posture of the
engaged analyst. Fieldwork in a country at war gave Bourdieu the

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opportunity and obligation to make ethnology a vital instrument of
symbolic struggle and not merely an academic discipline deprived of any
political function (Bourdieu, 1986: 37).

It was in the Algerian crucible, drenched in fear, suffused by daily risk

(bombs, assassinations, round-ups) and ‘ambient fascism’ (to use Jean
Sprecher’s expression), that an original thought was forged, nourished by
the most abstract philosophical debates and yet attuned to the calling of the
quotidian, alive to the complexity of the real, and fiercely resistant to theor-
etical simplifications. In turning to empirical research, Bourdieu activated
on a scientific plane the political dispositions that had been his since his
years at the Ecole normale supérieure, where he had been part of a small
left fringe that battled at once against the right and against the govern-
mental and communist left (Bianco, 2003). These dispositions, far from
being a handicap, were to be a formidable asset in conducting empirical
work that would render intelligible the mechanisms of colonial domination
in Algeria before feeding a theory of symbolic power equally applicable to
diverse societies.

Anthropology in the service of decolonization

Postwar France saw a renewal of the social sciences and particularly of
anthropology. With Race and History and Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-
Strauss (1952, 1955) gave that discipline unprecedented intellectual
nobility. This change of status in the hierarchy of disciplines enticed a
number of researchers – notably Georges Balandier, Louis Dumont, Michel
Leiris, and Jean Pouillon – to produce an ‘engaged’ anthropology that, by
definition, questioned colonization and the cultural discrimination on
which it was premised. Many important figures in the French intellectual
field, such as philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul Ricœur and historians
Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Fernand Braudel, also contributed at that time,
in different ways and to different degrees, to breaking down the walls
separating the different social sciences with regard to the Algerian
question.

The transformations internal to the intellectual world reinforced the

budding sociologist Bourdieu in his convictions, despite the impossibility of
expressing himself openly on the colonial question where he was conduct-
ing his investigations. For the significant advances in the intellectual field in
metropolitan France were not followed in Algeria, especially in ethnology,
whose field of study shrank like heated leather as the war expanded. If
researchers such as Germaine Tillion (1957), Thérèse Rivière (1995, an
ethnologist specializing on the Aurès), René Maunier (1930, an ethnologist
writing on the Berber world), or Robert Montagne (1921, a Morocconist)

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had produced distinguished field studies of the Maghreb in earlier years,
there was nothing of the kind when Bourdieu made his entry at the
University of Algiers. The field of sociology was then dominated by
staunchly conservative figures, like Jean Bousquet (a professor of North-
African sociology at the Law School and leader of its extreme-right
militants), Philippe Marçais (a member of the OAS), and Berber specialist
Jean Servier (1962). It was in this context marked by rigid political cleav-
ages that one must fully appreciate the importance of rigorous works such
as those of Jacques Berque (1955, 1960, 1962), who was a key intellectual
beacon for Bourdieu during the years of his field training.

But, even more than Berque, it is Germaine Tillion, a figure from German

deportation close to General de Gaulle,

11

who attracted Bourdieu’s

attention for the firmness of her early fieldwork, her closeness to her objects
of study, and her engagement with them, even if the young sociologist
immediately marked his distance from the culturalist approach of the
eminent anthropologist:

It seems dangerous to try [with Germaine Tillion, Algeria in 1957] to under-
stand all the phenomena of social disintegration observed in Algeria as mere
phenomena of acculturation. . . . Thus, the major land laws were conceived,
by their promoters themselves, as a methodical project of dismantlement of
the fundamental structures of the traditional economy. A veritable ‘social
surgery’ that cannot be confused with ‘cultural contagion’, a result of mere
contact, these measures (mainly the cantonment, the Senate decree of 1863,
and the 1873 Warnier Act), undertaken with total lucidity ‘in the short term’,
no doubt constitute one of the essential causes, if not the essential cause, of
the disintegration of traditional rural society. (Bourdieu, 1958: 118)

It is in relation to Tillion that the young Bourdieu positioned himself

from the beginning when he analysed the origins of Algerian under-
development, by choosing the very same society, the Chaouïa of the
Constantine region (East of Algiers), which had been hitherto perceived as
a closed universe whose poverty was attributed solely to cultural factors
and thus without relation to colonial policy. Bourdieu refuted this thesis as
early as 1958 by drawing on the work of Georges Balandier (1951), an
Africanist anthropologist and director of studies at the École des Hautes
Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, well known for his support for
decolonization.

Indeed, as Balandier observes, ‘contact occurred in a particular situation, the
colonial situation’ [characterized by] the domination of a numerically
minoritarian but ‘sociologically’ majoritarian society over an indigenous,
technologically and materially inferior majority; the distance between the
two societies that coexist without mixing; ‘economic satellitism’; a system of

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4 9 6

‘rationalizations’, more or less tinged with racism, meant to justify the
privileged situation of the Europeans; and, finally, latent or patent tension.
If contact between a highly industrialized civilization with a powerful
economy and a non-mechanized civilization with an archaic economy, if, to
speak the language of Tillion, ‘gawky godsends and unconscious misdeeds’,
could suffice to determine the disintegration of the structures of the
traditional society, it nonetheless remains that, to these perturbations, the
inevitable consequence of contact between two civilizations separated by an
abyss in the social realm, one must add the upheavals that were deliberately
and knowingly provoked. (Bourdieu, 1958: 118)

At the dawn of the 1960s, Bourdieu was still only an apprentice soci-

ologist, but his first publications – Sociologie de l’Algérie (1958), a synthetic
work that appeared in the ‘Que sais-je?’ series, and two articles published
by the government’s Social Secretariat in a mimeographed document distrib-
uted locally – already contributed to an important and innovative reflection
on the colonial question. In spite of their scientific object and tone, ‘The
Internal Logic of Traditional Algerian Society’ and ‘The Clash of Civiliz-
ations’ (Bourdieu, 1959a, 1959b) were published with considerable diffi-
culty by the Social Secretariat, according to Father Henri Sanson, the
publication director. From the beginning, Bourdieu established a umbilical
connection between social science and politics, between civilized and primi-
tive societies, and between the observer and the observed, that constituted
a radical epistemological rupture and a real advance for sociology in the
climate of tension caused by far-right pressure within the University of
Algiers. He also questioned the separation of disciplines that expressed the
colonial hierarchy in the intellectual order: sociology stricto sensu was
restricted to the study of the societies of Europe and North America, while
ethnology concerned itself with so-called primitive peoples and Orientalism
with peoples with universal religions but non-European languages.

One need not say how arbitrary and absurd this classification was. Be that
as it may, being about Kabyle society, my work found itself in a rather
strange position, in a way caught between Orientalism and ethnology.
(Bourdieu, 2000: 8)

This will to abolish the hierarchical and racializing division between soci-

ology and ethnology marked the writing of Sociologie de l’Algérie and led
to the book being noticed in foreign academic circles and by the few
Algerian intellectuals, who readily perceived its political import. It earned
Bourdieu the acerbic criticism of his colleagues at the University of Algiers.
In an undated letter to the historian André Nouschi, then in the metropole,
which we can date at the end of 1958 or the beginning of 1959, the young
apprentice sociologist wrote:

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Will I surprise you by saying that I’ve heard a thousand venomous and
rancorous compliments? You will guess that the ‘specialists’ . . . of Algiers
did not spare perfidious and syrupy allusions. . . . They quickly developed a
unique doctrine . . . about my little book: bookish, theoretical (what vocabu-
lary!), lacking in sustained experience of Algerian realities, this note on the
Europeans, etc. In short, this little metropolitan who meddles in talking
about Algeria when so many old specialists, etc., etc. One thinks of the
gardener’s dog who doesn’t eat the lettuces and will not let them be eaten.

The discontent of the Algiers academics derived from the fact that the

young ‘metropolitan’ professor disrupted the local intellectual game by
questioning their conception of anthropology founded on cultural discrimi-
nation. With Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu affirmed the principle of the equality
of cultures and cast doubt on the naturalizing vision by which the coloniz-
ers affirmed their superiority. Bourdieu described the difference between the
two worlds, European and Algerian, not as an inherent and eternal dispar-
ity, but as the product of a ‘clash of civilizations’ caused by colonization.
The phenomena of social, economic, and psychological disintegration
observed within the traditional society had to be grasped as the ineluctable
consequence ‘of an interaction of “external forces” (the irruption of
Western civilization) and “internal force” (the original structures of the
indigenous civilization)’ (Bourdieu, 1959b: 54).

From his first publications, Bourdieu thus pointed to the causative role

of colonization, the source of the main economic and social evils visited
upon Algeria, without pronouncing himself on the nationalist claim.
Nonetheless, a resolutely engaged orientation against the war and in favor
of independence is clearly evident in his youthful essays ‘War and Social
Mutation in Algeria’, ‘Revolution within the Revolution’, and ‘From Revol-
utionary War to Revolution’, three texts published in Etudes méditer-
ranéennes, Esprit, and L’Algérie de demain, a collected volume edited by
François Perroux, professor at the Collège de France (Bourdieu, 1960,
1961, 1962b) that established him at once as a significant new voice in the
scientific-political debate on decolonizing North Africa.

Returning to this first research allows us to draw out two axes that

organize this segment of Bourdieu’s overall work. The first axis concerns
the present Algerian society (what interests us here) in the throes of war and
of the upheaval of all orders that accompanied it, which runs through the
books Work and Workers in Algeria and The Uprooting (Bourdieu et al.,
1963, Bourdieu and Sayad, 1964) and extends to the articles of the early
1960s that accompanied their publication. The second is devoted to a later
and more pointed analysis of the social and symbolic structures of
traditional Kabyle society, treated as an ethnological laboratory from which
Bourdieu endeavors to extract the anthropological foundations of the

E t h n o g r a p h y 5(4)

4 9 8

Mediterranean mythical-religious system but also the bases of his general
theory of the practice of domination (Bourdieu, 1972, 1980).

For the historian of the social sciences and of the tradition of field

research in particular, the interest in these two books and of their early
‘sketches’

12

lies in allowing us to grasp, on the one hand, a scientific modus

operandi and, on the other, the radicality characteristic of a work and
political action (Bianco, 2003). For Bourdieu, efficacy in the defense of the
Algerian cause could only come from a real scientific investment. Under the
pen of this witness of history, the war appears as a magnifying glass reveal-
ing the deep structures of a national body in convulsions and enables the
analyst to renew ethnology by cutting its umbilical cord with the coloniz-
ation and racism that both sustained and shackled it then. In Bourdieu’s
hands, ethnosociology served as an instrument for rehabilitating peasant
cultures, which, in the Algerian context, constituted a symbolic revolution
that dismissed with one and the same stroke colonial fantasies and the revol-
utionary propaganda of the emerging Algerian elites and their intellectual
allies in Western countries. Bourdieu’s attitude diverged from the discourse
of nationalist leaders in that its goal was not to encourage this new elite in
its unconscious project of ‘destruction’ of its own culture but to help them
perceive the cultural contradictions at the heart of their project of national
construction. His own cultural uprooting is at the origin of the special atten-
tion that Bourdieu accorded to the least legitimate objects of study in the
‘indigenous’ tradition, such as rituals:

I would never have come to study ritual traditions if the same intention of
‘rehabilitation’ that had led me first to exclude rituals from the universe of
legitimate objects and to distrust all the works that gave it a place had not
pushed me, from 1958 on, to try to tear it from phony primitivist solicitude
and to attack, to its last defenses, the racist contempt that, through the shame
of self it manages to instill on its very victims, contributes to prohibiting them
from knowing and recognizing their own culture. Indeed, no matter how
great the effect of respectability and encouragement that can be produced,
more unconsciously than consciously, by the fact that a problem or method
comes to be constituted as highly legitimate in the scientific field, it could not
make one overlook the incongruity, even the absurdity, of fieldwork on ritual
practices carried out in the tragic circumstance of the war. (Bourdieu,
1980: 10)

How to ‘tickle the snake in its hole’

With the outbreak of the war, the violence that had bathed Algerian colonial
society from its beginning became open and declared, especially in the

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Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria at war

4 9 9

countryside, where, in response to the 1956 insurrection, the army
conducted sweeps and mass arrests as well as aerial bombardments. In
1957, the violence spread to the hearts of the urban centers, as attested by
the famous battle of Algiers, with the result that terrorism and repression
dominated the lives of the country’s urban population. It was in this climate
of horror and dread that Bourdieu conducted two large field studies, the
one devoted to the emergence of labor in the city, Work and Workers in
Algeria (Bourdieu et al., 1963), the other to the upheavals of the traditional
peasant society caused by the establishment of resettlement centers at the
behest of the French military, under the title The Uprooting (Bourdieu and
Sayad, 1964; see also Cornaton, 1998; Rocard, 2001).

Conceived as the extension of The Algerians and his first articles, these

two investigations constitute major contributions to an anthropology of
peasant wars and a dying colonialism (Wolf, 1971; Gosnell, 2002). They
are also pillars of Bourdieu’s Algerian œuvre; yet they remain little known,
even among francophone scholars. Though distinct, these two books come
from the same period, 1959–61 for the first and 1959–1960 for the second,
and partake of a single research program, since the study of work was also
carried out in the resettlement camps (Bourdieu et al., 1963: 13).

13

Under-

taken at the request of ARDES (the Association for Demographic Economic
and Society Research) and financed by the Algerian Development Fund,
these two studies both resort to statistics, charts, and documents as well as
extended interviews, direct observation, and photography.

14

For the first

time, Algerian students worked with a research team directed by Europeans.
Miss Azi, Mr Azi, Sedouk Lahmer, Ahmed Misraoui, Mahfoud Nechem,
Titah and Zekkal Marie-Aimée Hélie, Raymond Hélie, Raymond Cipolin,
and Samuel Guedj participated in the first field study on work; Abdelmalek
Sayad, Alain Accardo, Trad and Moulah Hénine joined some of them for
the resettlement camp study.

15

Having already perceived the weight of cultural factors in the operation

of the economy (Bourdieu, 1958, 1959b), Bourdieu had no difficulty
approaching the unemployed confronted with the harsh law of market
capitalism in the cities and shantytowns in order to grasp the distress that
animated this floating population whose traditional economic dispositions
were deeply at odds with the demands of the monetary economy and who
found refuge in the despair of tradition (Bourdieu, 1979). Ground-level
knowledge of the urban world and underworld enabled Bourdieu to
uncover the genesis of the Algerian subproletariat and of its malaise.
Disoriented, maladapted, caught between heaven and earth, the ‘empeas-
anted’ peasant (i.e., attached to the land and its values) suffers from aban-
doning his ancestral culture and his inability to face up to the exigencies
of a rationalized capitalist culture that remains inscrutable for want of
having the needed mental tools. Bourdieu discovered in the course of this

E t h n o g r a p h y 5(4)

5 0 0

field study that it is not possible to reduce economic agents to mere
‘bearers’ of objective structures; on the contrary, it is necessary to pose
empirically and theoretically ‘the question of the genesis of economic
dispositions and of the economic and social conditions of this genesis’
(Bourdieu, 1979: 7, 2000).

Although it was completed during this period, due to what was then-

judged to be its subversive content, The Uprooting was published only after
a delay, in 1964, that is, two years after Algerian independence. But this
first field study provided Bourdieu with an opportunity to meet, mingle
with, and interview displaced populations in resettlement centers in
collaboration with Abdelmalek Sayad. To carry out direct observation in
the regions hit hardest by the war (Collo, Kabylia, Ouarsenis) was a chal-
lenge. Bourdieu met it in a dogged effort, as the Kabyles say, to ‘tickle the
snake in its hole’, braving the converging injunctions of the French military
and the guerrillas of the FLN who battled for control over these territories.
An eyewitness of the horrors of war, the sociologist became through the
force of historical circumstance this messenger for whom speaking the truth
hic et nunc constitutes a vital mission. This could not but accelerate the
scientific maturation of the young ethno-sociologist:

There is no question that the exceptional, extraordinarily difficult (and
dangerous) conditions under which I had to work could not fail to sharpen
my vision through the ceaseless vigilance that they imposed. The very
practical problems that carrying out such field research continually posed,
often in a quite dramatic way, forced one to engage in a continuous reflec-
tion on the reasons and the raisons d’être of the study, on the motives and
intentions of the researcher, on all these questions that positivist methodol-
ogy spontaneously takes as resolved. (Bourdieu, 2000: 9)

The close and conjoint reading of Work and Workers in Algeria and The

Uprooting enables one to grasp the germinal role that field observation of
the transformations of the colonial society of Algeria under the extreme
conditions of a war of national liberation played in shaping not only
Bourdieu’s youthful writings, but also his durable scientific dispositions.
They bring to light the plinth of his inseparably scientific and political
engagements and set the whole of his work in a new light.

Notes

1 The connections between Kabyle and Béarnais society and the research

themes related to Algeria and France are particularly emphasized in the
essays collected in Practical Reasons. Thus, concerning the idea of symbolic
economy, Bourdieu (1998[1994]: 98) explains:

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Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria at war

5 0 1

The question I am going to examine is one that I have not ceased asking
from my first ethnological works on the Kabyle to my more recent research
on the world of art and, more precisely, on the functioning of artistic patron-
age in modern societies. I would like to show that, with the same instru-
ments, one can analyze phenomena as different as exchanges of honor in a
precapitalist society, or, in societies like our own, the action of foundations
such as the Ford Foundation or the Fondation de France, exchanges between
generations within a family, transactions on the markets of cultural or
religious goods, and so forth.

2 It suffices here to say that Pierre Bourdieu played a decisive role in my own

intellectual development. But I can also not avoid acknowledging the force
of the close relationship with Abdelmalek Sayad, one of Bourdieu’s first
students in Algiers, who later became a long-term collaborator and leading
sociologist of immigration (cf. Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2000), and with
Mouloud Mammeri, a novelist and researcher on the Kabyle world, who
was encouraged by Bourdieu to speak up in France, especially after 1983,
when Algeria prohibited all speech from the Berbers (see Mammeri and
Bourdieu, 1978 ; Bourdieu, 1992).

3 One will find a chronological sketch of the main political and cultural events

of this period in the appendix. For a history of the war, see Horne (1978),
Droz and Lever (1982), and the essays gathered in Harbi and Stora (2004).

4 ‘I was struck by the gulf between the positions of French intellectuals

concerning this war and its end and what I experienced in the army as well
as with the embittered “pieds noirs,” the coups d’état, the insurrections by
lower-class whites, the inevitable turn to de Gaulle, etc.’ (Bourdieu, 1986:
40).

5 Aron had also helped anthropologist Jean Cuisenier, originally established

in Tunisia, who later became Lévi-Strauss’s assistant at the Collège de
France.

6 Officially, there was no ‘Algerian War’ and France does not recognize the

veterans of this war – only soldiers and civilians who experienced the
‘events’.

7 For a description of the extraordinary hold of the French Communist Party

on intellectual life in France in the postwar decades, read Boschetti (1988).

8 The OAS (Organisation Armée Secrète) was a conspiratorial faction of the

French army in Algeria founded to sow terror in order to force the central
government to go back on its agreements with the Algerian Liberation
Front in favor of independence.

9 See Bourdieu’s evocation of Feraoun in his preface to Le Sueur’s (2001)

book on intellectuals during the Algerian war.

10 After independence, Mammeri searched for the instruments of objectiva-

tion necessary to analyse the evolution of Kabyle society within the

E t h n o g r a p h y 5(4)

5 0 2

Algerian nation. He was to play a key role in the development of fieldwork
in North Africa over the ensuing two decades. His relations with Bourdieu
are well illustrated by their ‘dialogue on oral poetry in Kabylia’ (Mammeri
and Bourdieu, 1978 – translated in this issue).

11 When Bourdieu arrived in Algeria, Germaine Tillion was already a

major intellectual and social figure. A student of Marcel Mauss, she had
conducted extensive fieldwork among the Chaouïa of the Aurès
montains from 1936 to 1940. She was also a founder of the French
Resistance network of the Musée de l’Homme and survived deportation
to the death camp of Ravensbrück. In 1955 she returned to Algeria to
create centers of social help dedicated to fighting poverty and illiteracy.
During the Algerian war, she was involved with her friend Albert
Camus in public campaigns against torture by the French army, and
later led campaigns against the death penalty and for prisoners’ rights
(see Tillion, 2001).

12 This expression is Bourdieu’s, who always considered the state of research

– at the time of publication – as a draft (or, according to the consecrated
expression, a ‘work in progress’ calling for subsequent revision and amplifi-
cation). Whence his obstinacy in returning to the same subjects and some-
times earlier writings in order to refine his thinking by applying new
analytical instruments or shedding new comparative light on the empirical
data (Delsaut and Rivière, 2002).

13 Bourdieu did not make a purely self-directed decision to study employment

in Algeria. The opportunity to collaborate with a group of statisticians in
the capacity of sociologist was offered to him by the ARDES, through the
mediation of Jacques Breil, a left Catholic in charge of statistics in Algeria
who had worked with Bourdieu on underdevelopment in the colony
(Bourdieu, 1959a). Breil was among those who facilitated field research at
the administrative level during this troubled period.

14 During this period, Bourdieu took over a thousand photographs which

constitute a veritable visual testimony of the transformations that were
shaking and shaping Algerian society.

15 One of these students, Moula Henine, was murdered by the OAS in 1961.

Le Déracinement is dedicated to him.

References

Ageron, Charles-Robert (1997) La Guerre d’Algérie et les Algériens. Paris:

Armand Colin.

Alleg, Henri (1957) La Question. Paris: Editions de Minuit.
Balandier, Georges (1951) ‘La situation coloniale’, Cahiers Internationaux de

Sociologie 11: 44–79.

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Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria at war

5 0 3

Berque, Jacques (1955) Structures sociales dans le Haut-Atlas. Paris: Presses

Universitaires de France.

Berque, Jacques (1960) Les Arabes d’hier à demain. Paris: Editions de Minuit.

[Trans. The Arabs: Their History and Future. London: Faber and Faber,
1964.]

Berque, Jacques (1962) Le Maghreb entre deux guerres. Paris: Seuil. [Trans.

French North Africa: The Maghrib Between Two World Wars. London:
Faber, 1967.]

Bianco, Lucien (2003) ‘Nous n’avions jamais vu ‘le monde’, Awal 27/28, Special

issue on ‘L’autre Bourdieu’: 267–77.

Boschetti, Anna (1988[1985]) The Intellectual Enterprise: Sartre and ‘Les

Temps Modernes’. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1958) Sociologie de l’Algérie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de

France. [Trans. The Algerians (preface by Raymond Aron). Boston, PA:
Beacon Press.]

Bourdieu, Pierre (1959a) ‘Logique interne de la société algérienne tradition-

nelle’, in Le Sous-développement, pp. 40–51. Algiers: Secrétariat Social.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1959b) ‘Le Choc des civilisations’, in Le Sous-développement,

pp. 52–64. Algiers: Secrétariat Social.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1960) ‘Guerre et mutation sociale en Algérie’, Études méditer-

ranéennes 7 (Spring): 25–37.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1961) ‘Révolution dans la révolution’, Esprit 1 (Spring):

27–40.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1962a) ‘Célibat et condition paysanne’, Études rurales 5–6

(April): 32–136.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1962b) ‘De la guerre révolutionnaire à la révolution’, in

François Perroux (ed.) L’Algérie de demain, pp. 5–13. Paris: Presses Univer-
sitaires de France.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1972) Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique. Geneva: Droz.

[Trans. Outline of a Theory of Practice, rev. and extended edn. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977.]

Bourdieu, Pierre (1979[1977]) Algeria 60. Economic Structures and Temporal

Structures. Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press and Editions
de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1980) Le Sens pratique. Paris: Editions de Minuit. [Trans.

Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity, 1990.]

Bourdieu, Pierre (1986) ‘The Struggle for Symbolic Order: An Interview with

Pierre Bourdieu’, Theory, Culture and Society 3(3): 37–51.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1992) ‘La réappropriation de la culture reniée’, in Tassadit

Yacine (ed.) Amour, phantasmes et société en Afrique du Nord et au Sahara,
pp. 17–22. Paris: L’Harmattan.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1998[1994]) Practical Reasons: On the Theory of Action.

Cambridge: Polity Press.

E t h n o g r a p h y 5(4)

5 0 4

Bourdieu, Pierre (1998) ‘L’odyssée de la réappropriation’, Awal Revue d’études

berbères 18 (November): 5–6. [Eng. trans. in this issue].

Bourdieu, Pierre (2000) ‘Entre amis’, Awal 21: 5–10.
Bourdieu, Pierre (2003) ‘Entretien avec Hafid Adnani et Tassadit Yacine’, Awal

27/28, Special issue on ‘L’autre Bourdieu’: 229–47.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Abdelmalek Sayad (1964) Le Déracinement. La crise de

l’agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie. Paris: Editions de Minuit.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Loïc Wacquant (2000) ‘The Organic Ethnologist of

Algerian Migration’, Ethnography 1–2 (Fall): 173–182.

Bourdieu, Pierre, Alain Darbel, Jean-Paul Rivet and Claude Seibel (1963)

Travail et travailleurs en Algérie. Paris and The Hague: Mouton and Co.

Cornaton, Michel (1998) Les Camps de regroupements et la guerre d’Algérie.

Paris: L’Harmattan.

Delsaut, Yvette and Marie-Christine Rivière (2002) Bibliographie de Pierre

Bourdieu. Pantin: Le Temps des Cerises.

Dermenghem, Émile (1954) Le Culte des saints dans l’islam maghrébin. Paris:

Gallimard.

Dresch, Jean (1963) Réforme agraire au Maghreb. Paris: Maspéro.
Droz, Bernard and Evelyne Lever (1982) Histoire de la guerre d’Algérie

(1954–1962). Paris: Seuil.

Émerit, Marcel (1951) L’Algérie à l’époque d’Abd-el-Kader. Paris: Editions

Larose.

Gosnell, Jonathan (2002) The Politics of Frenchness in Colonial Algeria,

1930–1954. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press.

Harbi, Mohammed and Benjamin Stora (eds) (2004) La Guerre d’Algérie,

1954–1962, la fin de l’amnésie. Paris: Laffont.

Horne, Alistair (1978) A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962. New York:

Viking.

Le Sueur, James D. (2001) Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during

the Decolonization of Algeria. Preface by Pierre Bourdieu. Philadelphia, PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1952) Race and History. Paris: UNESCO.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1955) Tristes Tropiques. Paris: Plon. [New York: Modern

Library, 1997.]

Maunier, René (1930) Mélanges de sociologie nord-africaine. Paris: Alcan.
Mammeri, Mouloud and Pierre Bourdieu (1978) ‘Dialogue sur la poésie orale

en Kabylie’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 23 (September):
51–66. [English trans. in this issue.]

Montagne, Robert (1921) Note sur la kasbah de Mehdiya. Rabat: Larose.
Nouschi, André (1961) Enquête sur le niveau de vie des populations rurales

constantinoises. Paris and Tunis: Presses Universitaires de France.

Nouschi, André (2003) ‘Autour de “Sociologie de l’Algérie” ’, Awal 27/28,

Special issue on ‘L’autre Bourdieu’: 29–35.

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Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria at war

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Rivière, Thérèse (1995) Aurès-Algérie, 1935–1936: Photographies. Paris:

Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.

Rocard, Michel (2001) Rapport sur les centres de regroupement. Paris: Les

Mille et une nuits.

Sanson, Henri (2003) ‘C’était un esprit curieux’, Awal 27/28, Special issue on

‘L’autre Bourdieu’: 279–86.

Servier, Jean (1962) Les Portes de l’année. Paris: Robert Laffont.
Sprecher, Jean (2003) ‘Il se sentait bien avec nous’, Awal 27/28, Special issue

on ‘L’autre Bourdieu’: 295–305.

Tillion, Germaine (1957) L’Algérie en 1957. Paris: Editions de Minuit. [Algeria:

The Realities. New York: Knopf, 1959.]

Tillion, Germaine (2001) Il était une fois l’ethnographie. Paris: Seuil.
Vidal-Naquet, Pierre (1961) La Raison d’État. Paris: Editions de Minuit.
Wolf, Eric (1971) Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper.
Yacine, Tassadit (forthcoming) ‘Pierre Bourdieu asmusnaw kabyle’, in Pierre

Bourdieu, Dialogues sur la Kabylie.

Chronological highlights of Algerian colonial history

1830:

French troops land at the beach of Sidi-Ferruch with 103 war
ships.

1832:

The Emir Abdelkader organizes resistance to the French invasion
in the Oran region.

1837:

Treatise of Tafna, whereby Abdelkader recognizes French rule
and is granted control over the western and central regions of
Algeria.

1840:

General Bugeaud launches the policy of settlement with his
‘soldier ploughers’.

1844–5:

Ordinances confiscating land from native Algerians. French
troops reach 108,000.

1847:

General Bugeaud occupies Lower Kabylia.

1848:

Deportation of the Republicans to Algeria; volunteer settlers
(from the Paris and Lyon region) are given 10 hectares and a
house.

1857:

With the occupation of Higher Kabylia by Randon, Kabylia is
under French rule.

1871–2:

Bachagha Mokrani insurrection in Kabylia.

1877–1912:

Insurrection of the Touaregs of the Hoggar led by Cheikh Amoud
Ben Mokhtar.

1916:

Unrest in the Aurès.

1919:

The 1915 Clémenceau Law grants French citizenship to a small
number of Algerians recognized as pro-France.

E t h n o g r a p h y 5(4)

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1927:

Created in Paris the previous year, the North-African Star (Étoile
nord-africaine) demands Algerian independence. Ferhat Abbas’s
Federation of Elected Indigenous claims equal rights and duties
for all the colony’s inhabitants.

1930:

Grandiose celebrations for the Centennial of the Conquest in the
presence of the French President.

1942:

British and American troops land in Algiers.

1943:

Ferhat Abbas publishes the Manifesto of the Algerian People,
demanding that the Allies recognize the equality of the European
and Muslim communities of Algeria.

1945:

8 May: on the day of Allied Victory, popular demonstrations in
Sétif, Guelma, and Kherrata are brutally repressed, resulting in
45,000 dead.

1946:

Ferhat Abbas founds the Union Démocratique du Manifeste
Algérien (UDMA).
Emmanuel Roblès brings together Algerian intellectuals of all
tendencies in his journal La Forge.

1954:

Night of 31 October: launch of the national insurrection. The
National Liberal Front (FLN) is founded in Cairo.

1955:

The disintegration of the Algerian situation leads to a political
crisis in France.
1 April: Declaration of a state of emergency in the colony in
response to an increase in nationalist attacks.

1956:

22 January: Albert Camus speaks in favor of a cease-fire.
March: Formation of the Guy Mollet government and parlia-
mentary vote granting it ‘special powers’ to respond to the
Algerian ‘events’.
August: the FLN Congress at the Soummam ushers in the
formation of a National Council of the Algerian Revolution
(CNRA).

1957:

Series of attacks in Algiers. French paratroopers react violently.
Arbitrary arrests, torture, and summary executions begin to be
denounced in the metropole.

1958:

13 May: a French-Algerian crowd occupies the Palace of Govern-
ment. Creation of a Committee of Public Safety.
10 September: creation of a Provisional Government of the
Algerian Republic (GPRA), with Ferhat Abbas as President.

1959:

Autumn: the GRPA declares itself ready to negotiate. De Gaulle
promises a referendum on self-determination, which is opposed
by the partisans of French Algeria. The vote on a motion in favor
of Algerian independence is avoided at the United Nations.

1960:

24 January to 2 February: the pro-France ‘Ultras’ set up barri-
cades at the tunnel of the University of Algiers.

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June: the French government opens serious negotiations with the
nationalist insurgents in Melun.
December: De Gaulle visits Algiers; large-scale demonstration of
the ‘Muslim’ population triggers mass shootings by the French
paratroopers.

1961:

January: referendum on self-determination.
Creation of the Organization of the Secret Army (OAS), a pro-
French resistance organization led by generals Challe, Jouhaud,
Zeller and Salan, leading to the ‘Putsch of the Generals’ (April).

1962:

15 March: the OAS assassinates Mouloud Feraoun.
18 March: signature of the Évian agreements, followed by a
cease-fire declaration.

1 July:

Referendum on Algerian independence (99.7% in favor).

5 July:

Proclamation of Algerian independence.

Key cultural works of the period on Algeria

Camus, Albert (1942) L’Étranger. Paris: Gallimard. [Trans. The Stranger. New

York: Knopf, 1946.]

Camus, Albert (1947) La Peste. Paris: Gallimard. [The Plague. New York:

Knopf, 1948.]

Camus, Albert (1951) L’Homme révolté. Paris: Gallimard. [Trans. The Rebel.

New York: Knopf, 1956.]

Fanon, Franz (1952) Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Seuil. [Trans. Black

Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 1968.]

Mammeri, Mouloud (1952) La Colline oubliée. Paris: Plon.
Dib, Mohammed (1952) La Grande Maison. Paris: Seuil.
Dib, Mohammed (1954) L’Incendie. Paris: Seuil.
Féraoun, Mouloud (1954) Le Fils du pauvre. Paris: Seuil.
Yacine, Kateb (1956) Nedjma. Paris: Seuil.
Alleg, Henri (1957) La Question. Paris: Editions de Minuit.
Tillion, Germaine (1957) L’Algérie en 1957. Paris: Minuit.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1958) Sociologie de l’Algérie. Paris: PUF, rev. and expanded

1961. [Trans. The Algerians (preface by Raymond Aron). Boston: Beacon
Press, 1962.].

Pélégri, Jean (1959) Les Oliviers de la justice. Paris: Gallimard.
Fanon, Franz (1961) Les Damnés de la terre. Paris. [Trans. The Wretched of

the Earth. New York: Grove, 1963.]

■

TASSADIT YACINE is Maître de conférence and Researcher at

the Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale at the École des hautes
études en sciences sociales, Paris, as well as a member of the

E t h n o g r a p h y 5(4)

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Instituto Orientale de Napoli. She is the Editor of Awal, the journal
of Berber studies founded by Mouloud Mammeri with the
sponsorship of Pierre Bourdieu. Her research deals with Berber
culture and society, with a focus on oral poetry and history. She is
the author of Poésie berbère et identité (1987), L’Izli ou l’amour
chanté en kabyle (1988), Les Voleurs de feu. Eléments d’une
anthropologie sociale et culturelle de l’Algérie (1992), and Chacal
ou la ruse des dominés. Aux origines du malaise culturel des
intellectuels algériens (2001). She is currently at work on an
anthropology of gendered emotions and on a volume of the early
writings of Pierre Bourdieu on Algeria. Address: EHESS, 54 Bd
Raspail, 75006 Paris, France. [email: yacine@msh-paris]

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Yacine

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Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria at war

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